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Any idea about the process details of the process that generated them. My feeling is that anything that is written to /tmp is safe to delete. Any process writing them would have to assume they would be nuked at some point or they would have to be written somewhere else? Are the files ASCII or binary?

They were Smarty cache files. They're supposed to be written in ./cache - don't know why they got written to /tmp (and many were zero bytes at that). One of the cache dirs got really big and the disk almost ran out of space. I deleted them all with no ill effects.